[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]
On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for
than how it makes us scream.
The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one
of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was
at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20th century’s most
significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even
(I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in
execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do;
but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way,
one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.
That
rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction,
rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like
horror than like cinema
verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its
emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s
culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the
parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for
those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these
psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in
that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good
people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has
watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the
killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this
transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.
To be
clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not
just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the
next step in what I called, in this post
on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes
in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most
potent (if extra-legal) arguments
for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether
intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional
and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and
executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and
horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the
moment has cooled off. Last House is
scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but
what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and
that’s a pretty important effect.
Next
political horror tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?
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